Jas' Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. His research interests include Roman and early Christian art, viewing and viewer-response in art, pilgrimage, the receptions of antiquity including the history of collecting and the musuem, art and text including ekphrasis.
He will present "Visual Ontologies: Style, Archaism, and the Construction of the Sacred in the Western Tradition" as the 2015 Franklin M. Ludden Lecture in Art History and Criticism, presented by the Department of History of Art.
The lecture examines the ways sacred images have been framed by other images, often in different styles, within the Western tradition in order to establish their aura. The lecture will move from ancient Greece and Rome via the Middle Ages in Byzantium and the west to the Counter Reformation.
